D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

[overgeeked]

Well, D&D as typically presented clearly is a game that can be won. I win White Plume Mountain by getting the weapons out of the dungeon. I win Speaker in Dreams by learning about the shadowy figure behind the Baron and defeating its evil schemes. Etc.

Not really, no. That’s conflating the mission in the game with the game itself. You can only “win” D&D by playing. Failing the mission is not failing the game. That’s video game thinking. RPGs aren’t video games. The game isn’t the mission. This instance of this game with this group at this time is this mission. There will be other missions. There will be other play times. Other groups. Other games.

RPGs are tea party with dice. Conflating the game with the mission is akin to thinking you need to stick the real Barbie doll in the real microwave because she said an imaginary mean thing to you for spilling imaginary tea on her imaginary ballgown.

You can only “win” by honestly engaging and playing. You can only “lose” by not honestly engaging and playing. The mission is the character’s goal, not necessarily the player’s.

“The D&D game has neither losers nor winners, it has only gamers who relish exercising their imagination. The players and the DM share in creating adventures in fantastic lands where heroes abound and magic really works. In a sense, the D&D game has no rules, only rule suggestions. No rule is inviolate, particularly if a new or altered rule will encourage creativity and imagination. The important thing is to enjoy the adventure.”

Tom Moldvay
3 December 1980

 

[Manbearcat]

Another way of saying this (along the lines of my last point) is that if the game is complex along the dimension of tactical play, then somebody refusing to take a vital action "because my character wouldn't do that" is playing a less sophisticated game in that dimension.

That is certainly a very hefty part of it, but not the only part. I'm also referring to another equally important part. That is the tendency to want to turn the game into Dungeons and Beavers during the town phase. Rather than efficiently gathering info on prospective expeditions, hiring necessary cohorts, managing funds, and loading out your character...you're busy chatting up the baker and buying pastries...going to the tailor and then coming back and showing us your bedazzled new cloak and high boots and going on and on about it...trying to get wasted at the tavern and start singalongs with the sailors.

That occupation of table time and wresting of the site of play from the expedition (and the logistics required to facilitate the expedition) to conflict-neutral Cosplay has a place in a certain sort of D&D game. It is anathema to the kind of game I'm talking about.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Oftentimes with this sort of thing, I find it useful to consider how any given person would fill in the blanks of the following phrase: "When I'm playing, I want to avoid the tedious [] so that I can get to the good stuff, like []." I like this, because it gives people the freedom to speak out against things they don't like (not with intent to judge, just expressing what turns them off), while letting them put the spotlight on what they do. Part of the reason I like it is that I've seen, either directly or indirectly, all of the following:

Person 1. Tedious: "flowery descriptions" and "every single attack is narrated"; Good Stuff: "surviving the fight" and "continuing the adventure."
Person 2. Tedious: "rules minutiae" and "bookkeeping"; Good Stuff: "player creativity" and "exploring the world."
Person 3. Tedious: "parity" and "illusionism"; Good Stuff: "finding out how all our tools interact" and "transcending things that used to be challenges."
Person 4. Tedious: "having to optimize to succeed" and "getting bogged down in realism"; Good Stuff: "not having to hold back" and "telling the story I want to tell."

And it now occurs to me, on reflection, that many folks may think I numbered these based on editions, but that wasn't my intention--these are just people I have known, names changed to protect the innocent.

And the thing is...many of these aren't necessarily compatible, but aren't necessarily incompatible either. That's sort of the problem with designing D&D. Most people sort their own groups out, so the people coming to any given table all want the same thing. Between tables, though, it can be a lot harder. I think it sometimes does a disservice to gaming that we try so hard to say that every single person above needs to play by exactly the same rules. Even the most tempered expectations of "modularity" remain illusory, and it's...very frustrating.

 

[overgeeked]

I just read the blog. It's hardly a counterpoint to system matters - it's a huge piece of advocacy for a particular system, namely, descriptor-based drama resolution (using "drama" in the Jonathan Tween/Ron Edwards sense of fortune, karma, drama as methods of resolution).

The use of free descriptors, together with the following passage, actually reminded me of a different RPG:

Have you read Brideshead Revisited? The Wizard of Earthsea? Foundation and Empire? Any captivating novel, regardless of timeframe, setting, or genre? Well now you can run a full FKR game based on that book. You don't need an RPG sourcebook because all books are now sourcebooks. All television shows are sourcebooks. All movies and songs and comics and memes and medical brochures are now sourcebooks.​

This could be lifted right from Robin Laws HeroQuest Revised. Except that Laws's game uses fortune rather than drama as its resolution method, which shifts the dynamic of play away from tactics (to quote from the blog, "The freedom of the Player Characters to attempt any tactic to solve a problem, subject to the adjudication of the Game Master") and onto the narrative qualities of the fiction (especially pacing and success vs failure, which are big parts of HQ rev).

I think you’re misunderstanding what the blog and FKR is striving for. The idea is that the fictional world is the ruleset. Whatever makes sense according to the world has primacy. That you can have a perfectly good game without a game system beyond the world by focusing on what makes sense in that world. Only if the world is focused on drama will drama matter. If you’re playing a comedy, drama is less important.

 

[pemerton]

If I'm running a Pawn Stance dungeon crawl (typically Moldvay...never Torchbearer), then someone "distracting/disrupting" the game with characterization or trying to imprint their conception on the PC onto a game (such that gamestate trajectory is influenced by it) which is exclusively about "defeat 3d obstacle course within constraints of system/loadout/guile" makes for an objectively worse game. The expectation is that they (more or less) fully reign in their 3d roleplaying.

Another way of saying this (along the lines of my last point) is that if the game is complex along the dimension of tactical play, then somebody refusing to take a vital action "because my character wouldn't do that" is playing a less sophisticated game in that dimension.

I don't know if "less sophisticated" is right. It's just bad play.

If we're thinking about White Plume Mountain as performance for an audience, then - at the point where we have to cross over the hanging discs - it might be amusing for me to suddenly lean into my PCs fear of heights. But if we're playing to win the tournament (and before I get dogpiled, yes I know S2 was never actually a tournament module but it would be well-suited to being one) then the player on our team who does that is just a spoiler. They've misunderstood the context of the activity we're all engaged in.

I don't think that discussion of tactical play in a RPG has to use the same analytic and evaluative vocabulary as the discussion of the portrayal of characters - where notions like shallow, sophisticated and the like do have purchase because we're engaged in aesthetic judgement. When it comes to tactics, I think relevant notions are more like clever, bold, overly cautious, etc.

 

[Bill Zebub]

That is certainly a very hefty part of it, but not the only part. I'm also referring to another equally important part. That is the tendency to want to turn the game into Dungeons and Beavers during the town phase. Rather than efficiently gathering info on prospective expeditions, hiring necessary cohorts, managing funds, and loading out your character...you're busy chatting up the baker and buying pastries...going to the tailor and then coming back and showing us your bedazzled new cloak and high boots and going on and on about it...trying to get wasted at the tavern and start singalongs with the sailors.

So true!

One of the enduring legends from my original junior high gaming group (ca. 1981) was when one of the players (Matt G., are you reading this?) went to a bookstore. The rest of us were wondering what clever plot he had in mind, but he was just browsing. "Any interesting books?" became our shorthand way of saying, "Stop wasting precious D&D time!"

 

[pemerton]

I think it sometimes does a disservice to gaming that we try so hard to say that every single person above needs to play by exactly the same rules.

Who is the we you are referring to? There are plenty of us who a pretty cognisant of a range of RPGs, a range of approaches, a range of techniques, etc.

RPGs are tea party with dice.

Says who? Tea parties are low stakes, conch-passing, consensually-authored fiction.

RPGs, as I like to play them, are pretty much the opposite of this. One of the ways they achieve this is to substitute action resolution rules that use dice (and hence distribute authority and obligations randomly and sometimes unexpectedly) for consensual, conch-passing authorship.

It's also slightly ironic that you quote Moldvay, as (despite what Moldvay writes) it's hard to think of a version of D&D that leans more strongly and consistently into the win-conditions of play than Moldvay's version of the game! And playing (say) Keep on the Borderlands is, in my experience of it, nothing like a tea party with dice.

 

[Oofta]

The second paragraph here - especially the reference to charts - shows a fairly limited understanding of the range of possible RPG rules.

And the first paragraph shows a misunderstanding of my point as reiterated by @Malmuria. The problem that mainstream D&D causes for romance is that romance is a strong source of motivation that affects a person's choices and actions; and mainstream D&D doesn't have much room for those choices and actions, because they lead to departures from "the mission".

Maybe in your games lack romance, personal commitments and things other than the "mission". That's not the fault, nor responsibility of the game rules. My games have plenty.

We play a reasonably heavy RP game. That means relationships and personal interactions of all sorts happen organically based on what the player believes their PC would think and do. Having rules that dictate what a PC thinks or feels is the last thing I would want.

So. Again. What would so called "support" look like?

 

[overgeeked]

Here you are defining fun in a way that includes things you personally find enjoyable, but excludes things you personally do not find enjoyable (even though other people do). The reason 'have fun' as the established goal of play does not make much sense is that we all can enjoy quite different things that might not be compatible. There is seldom one sort of thing that would be fun in any given moment. We have to choose what sort of fun to pursue and given a group pursuit we should do so as a group.

Depending on the game and group competitive behavior, caring about performance, celebrating POG (play of the game) moments, working together to beat challenges might be the objective and a player not being that sort of thing and fighting it against might be unacceptable.

Basically "fun" on it's own does no work. The second we agree to take part in a shared group activity we should be striving to have a particular sort of fun together because our individual fun is no longer primary. We have other people to consider.

Only in this context, with people who take their RPGs very seriously indeed, is “fun” somehow not self evident.

Take two other group activities. Comedy and sex. We can all agree that, by and large, fun is the goal. And we mysteriously have no trouble understanding that what is fun depends entirely on the people involved. I like slapstick, you like surrealism. You like Kevin Spade, I like Jimmy Carr. What’s fun for me isn’t necessarily fun for you. But fun is still the goal.

But importantly, in those activities we start with the shared interest in particular types of fun and separating into groups based on those preferences. You don’t get together with anyone who enjoys comedy or sex (generally speaking), you get together with people who enjoy the same types of comedy and sex as you do. We’re weird in RPG circles in that we group up first based on shared hobby, then complain and argue about how certain groups do or don’t work together based on preferences. Well, yeah. If you want pawn stance play, open with that when finding a group. If you want deep RP, open with that. We won’t be able to do any better than flail about until we can actually talk about these things without it descending into arguments.

 

[pemerton]

I think you’re misunderstanding what the blog and FKR is striving for. The idea is that the fictional world is the ruleset. Whatever makes sense according to the world has primacy. That you can have a perfectly good game without a game system beyond the world by focusing on what makes sense in that world.

What have I misunderstood? You're describing a system.

I also don't think you're familiar with drama in the Edwards and Tweet sense of the phrase (ie drama, karma, fortune as three approaches to resolution). Here's Edwards:

​

For Event Resolution, the relevant terms are Drama, Fortune, and Karma (often called DFK). These terms describe the mechanical and social means, among the real people, by which an imaginary action or event is determined to occur.​

• Drama resolution relies on asserted statements without reference to listed attributes or quantitative elements.
• Karma resolution relies on referring to listed attributes or quantitative elements without a random element.
• Fortune resolution relies on utilizing a random device of some kind, usually delimited by quantitative scores of some kind.

Here Edwards notes that the terminology has its origins in Everway (ie with Tweet).